So the disposition of mankind is at the bottom of the suffering and the division.  There is rebellion and perverseness mingled with the helplessness and ignorance and sorrow.  No man ever understands or can speak to the religious life unless he has the consciousness of this inner moral cleft.  No man will ever be able to preach with power about God unless he does it chiefly in terms of God’s difference from man and man’s perilous estate and desperate need of Him.  Indeed, God is not like us, not like this inner life of ours; this is what we want to hear.  God is different; that is why we want to be able to love Him.  And being thus different, we are separated from Him, both by the inner chasm of the divided soul and the outer chasm of remote and hostile nature.  Then comes the final question:  How are we, being helpless, to reach Him?  How are we, being guilty, to find Him?

When men deal with these queries, with this range of experience, this set of inward perceptions, then they are preaching religiously.  And then, I venture to say, they do not fail either of hearers or of followers.  Then there is what Catherine Booth used to call “liberty of speech”; then there is power because then we talk of realities.  For what is it that looks out from the eyes of religious humanity?  Rebellion, pride? no!  Humility, loneliness, something of a just and deserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an intense desire.  This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger, its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race.  The mainspring of human activity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all the thousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient cry, “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!” That unquenched thirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness of the ocean underlies the restless upper waves.  The dynamic of the world is the sense of the divine reality.  The woe of the world is man’s inability to discover and appropriate that reality.  Who that has entered truly into life does not perceive beneath all the glitter of its brilliance, the roar of its energy and achievement, the note of melancholy?  The great undertone of life is solemn in its pathetic uniformity.  The poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly upon that melancholy undertone.  Who ever better understood the futility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracks down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians?  Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy long ago by the AEgean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their turbid ebb and flow of human misery.  Sometimes the voices of our humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!” Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity and pain.  Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse The Nodding Stars.[29]